Understanding how well your tables and indexes fit to buffer pool are often very helpful to understand why some queries are IO bound and others not – it may be because the tables and indexes they are accessing are not in cache, for example being washed away by other queries. MySQL Server does not provide [...]
Reasons for run-away main Innodb Tablespace
June 10, 2010 By 2 Comments
So you’re running MySQL With innodb_file_per_table option but your ibdata1 file which holds main (or system) tablespace have grown dramatically from its starting 10MB size. What could be the reason of this growth and what you can do about it ? There are few things which are always stored in main tablespace – these are [...]
Paul McCullagh answers your questions about PBXT
November 20, 2009 By 2 Comments
Following on from our earlier announcement, Paul McCullagh has responded with the answers to your questions – as well as a few I gathered from other Percona folks, and attendees of OpenSQL Camp. Thank you Paul! What’s the “ideal” use case for the PBXT engine, and how does it compare in performance?  When would I [...]
Air traffic queries in InfiniDB: early alpha
November 2, 2009 By 19 Comments
As Calpont announced availability of InfiniDB I surely couldn’t miss a chance to compare it with previously tested databases in the same environment. See my previous posts on this topic: Analyzing air traffic performance with InfoBright and MonetDB Air traffic queries in LucidDB I could not run all queries against InfiniDB and I met some [...]
How much memory can MySQL use in the worst case?
February 12, 2009 By 17 Comments
I vaguely recall a couple of blog posts recently asking something like “what’s the formula to compute mysqld’s worst-case maximum memory usage?” Various formulas are in wide use, but none of them is fully correct. Here’s why: you can’t write an equation for it.
How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit
November 24, 2008 By 17 Comments
Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]
Picking datatype for STATUS fields
August 9, 2008 By 24 Comments
Quite commonly in the applications you would need to use some kind of “status” field – status of order – “new”, “confirmed”, “in production”, “shipped” status of job, message etc. People use variety of ways to handle them often without giving enough thought to the choice which can cause problems later. Perhaps worst, though quite [...]
Wanted: Better memory profiling for MySQL
May 18, 2008 By 4 Comments
Quite frequently I would log in to customers system and find MySQL using too much memory. I would look at memory consumed by Innodb (it is often higher than innodb_buffer_pool_size) substract memory used by other global buffers such as query_cache_size and key_buffer and will in many cases see some mysterous memory which I can’t really [...]
The MySQL optimizer, the OS cache, and sequential versus random I/O
April 28, 2008 By 17 Comments
In my post on estimating query completion time, I wrote about how I measured the performance on a join between a few tables in a typical star schema data warehousing scenario. In short, a query that could take several days to run with one join order takes an hour with another, and the optimizer chose [...]
Should you have your swap file enabled while running MySQL ?
April 6, 2008 By 31 Comments
So you’re running dedicated MySQL Linux box with plenty of memory, so the good question arises if you should have swap file enabled or disable it ? I’ve seen production successfully running on boxes both with and without swap file so it is not the question of you must do it this or that way [...]
